How to Get Information About a File using Node.js ?

Last Updated : 02 Jul, 2024

Node.js is an open-source and cross-platform runtime environment built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine for executing JavaScript code outside of a browser. You need to recollect that NodeJS isn’t a framework, and it’s not a programming language. In this article, we will discuss how to get information about a file using Node.js

Approach

We will use the fs module of Node.js to extract information about files. The fs module is an inbuilt module. We will use the fs.stat() module of the fs module to get all the information related to the file. If to get information about the uploaded files then we can handle them using npm packages like multer which handles all different types of files. Let us go through step by step. First, create a file in the current working directory whose information you want to view.

Node fs.stat() method

The fs.stat() method is used to return information about the given file or directory. It returns an fs.Stat object which has several properties and methods to get details about the file or directory.

Syntax:

fs.stat( path, options, callback )

Attributes:

Property	Description	Type
dev	The id of the device containing the file.	bigInt or number
mode	Bit-field description of the file type and mode of the given file.	bigInt or number
nlink	The number of hard links for the file.	bigInt or number
uid	The User Id of the file owner.	bigInt or number
gid	The Group Id of the file owner.	bigInt or number
rdev	Device id of the file if it is a special file.	bigInt or number
blksize	The block size for a file system Input/Output.	bigInt or number
ino	File inode number. It contains the basic information about the file.	bigInt or number
size	The total size of the file in bytes.	bigInt or number
blocks	The number of blocks allocated to the given file.	bigInt or number
atimeMs	The timestamp representing the file’s last accessed time.	bigInt or number
mtimeMs	The timestamp representing the file’s last modified time.	bigInt or number
ctimeMs	The timestamp representing the file last changed time, when the inode was changed.	bigInt or number
birthtimeMs	The timestamp representing when the file was created.	bigInt or number
aTime	The Date object representing the file’s last access time.	Date
mTime	The Date object representing the file’s last modified time.	Date
cTime	The Date object representing the file’s last changed time.	Date
birthtime	The Date object representing when the file was created.	Date

Steps to Get Information About a File using Node.js

Step 1: Create an "app.js" file and initialize your project with npm.

npm init

Step 2: Create an info.txt file in the project folder.

Project structure:

Example: This example demonstrates getting file information in with Node js using fs.stat() method.

Node

// app.js

//Importing fs module 
const fs = require("fs");

//stat methods takes path and a callback function as input
fs.stat("./info.txt", function(err, stats){

    //Checking for errors
   if(err){
       console.log(err)
   }
   else{
    //Logging the stats Object
   console.log(stats)
   }
});

Run app.js file using below command:

node app.js

Output:

So by using the file system of nodeJS you can get all the required information about any file in the local file system.